Category: Media

NBC News Wants to Teach You How to Store Guns Correctly

I grew up watching NBC News because our local TV station was an NBC affiliate. We’d hit the local news, followed by the network news.

It wasn’t until I was a fair bit older–older than I’d like to admit, really–when I realized just how biased NBC News actually was. It was kind of jarring.

They’re especially bad about issues like guns, and I cringe every time I find an article from them on the topic. It’s usually not likely they’ll speak with anyone who understands them and when they do, they aren’t exactly flattering.

So when I saw they published a piece on gun storage, well, I was prepared to be disappointed. Especially when it talked about “experts.” That usually means anti-gun mouthpieces who have never even touched a gun without fainting, so the advice is going to be geared to make guns as useless as possible. That…didn’t happen.

Instead, it’s a sober, reasonable discussion of various methods of gun storage, some of their pros and cons, and mostly just leaves it there.

Yes, it cites studies that claims most gun owners aren’t securing their guns, but those are the studies that are out there. I’m not going to fault the writer for going there when that’s the information available.

This is perhaps the most troubling part of the piece:

Twenty-six states and Washington, D.C., have safe-storage laws that punish gun owners if a child accesses an unsecured firearm. These laws have drawn support from gun safety advocates and the U.S. Surgeon General, but they’re opposed by gun rights groups that argue people should be free to decide when and how to secure their weapons.

That’s not quite how the debate falls–mandatory storage laws have a bad habit of getting in the way of someone’s self-defense needs, which is why gun rights advocates oppose them–so this bit presents a bit of the writer’s bias, but this is someone working for NBC News.

Nothing about this is surprising.

Yet from here, it’s just a brief discussion of some of the gun storage options out there. It’s very brief, so a lot of nuance is missing, and there seems to be a phobia about guns loaded, but it’s not the most terrible article on the topic I’ve ever seen.

So that leads me to wonder why NBC News never thought to write it before.

Oh, I get that Surgeon General Vivek Murthy made headlines recently talking about this as a small part of his overall desire to see our gun rights stomped on, but there was no reason not to discuss this a lot earlier.

We have a reach here at Bearing Arms. The other gun rights sites out there do as well, and ours may well be more targeted than NBC News ever would be, but they have a broader reach and they can speak to the more casual gun owner.

They could have hit this years ago. They could rehash it regularly, even, just to make sure that people know what their options actually are.

Why didn’t they?

For people who seem to believe they have the duty to change the world, this is a simple thing they could have done ages ago.

Supreme Court backs Biden administration in social media case

Held: Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Article III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant. 
[In other words, we aren’t going to rule on this because…..reasons. So the federal goobermint can go right ahead and keep on doing this slimy crap]

Respondents are two States and five individual social-media users
who sued dozens of Executive Branch officials and agencies, alleging
that the Government pressured the platforms to censor their speech in
violation of the First Amendment.

Following extensive discovery, the District Court issued a preliminary injunction. The Fifth Circuit affirmed in part and reversed in part. The court held that both the state plaintiffs and the individual plaintiffs had Article III standing to seek injunctive relief.

On the merits, the court held that the Government entities and officials, by “coerc[ing]” or “significantly encourag[ing]” the platforms’ moderation decisions, transformed those decisions into state action. The court then modified the District Court’s injunction to state that the defendants shall not coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to suppress protected speech on their platforms.

 

TPTB are apparently running scared and are getting their knives out for SloJoe.

ABC, AP, CBS, NBC All Join Heritage, Judicial Watch in FOIA Request for DOJ to Release Biden’s Special Counsel Interview

A large group of news outlets have joined with Judicial Watch and the Heritage Foundation to sue Biden’s Department of Justice for the release of the audio of special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with Joe Biden in the investigation into classified documents found at the president’s residence and office.

Among those suing the department under the Freedom of Information Act for the release are ABC News, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, NBC News, Reuters, Univision, and the Washington Post.

The outlets are seeking all audio and video recordings of Hur’s five-hour interview with Biden. Biden has asserted executive privilege over the recordings.

“These recordings will help the public evaluate Hur’s decision not to charge Biden and to close the investigation into classified documents found at Biden’s former office and private residence,” the suit stated.

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Analysis: The Pulitzer for Propaganda Goes to…

In 2023, the Washington Post published a series of articles about AR-15-style rifles. The series was scientifically illiterate, error-ridden, propagandistic, and willfully misleading.

Naturally, it has just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Here are the facts, not that these matter even a little bit to the Pulitzer committee, members of which declined to answer questions for this column.

The AR-15 and rifles based on its design are two things at once: They are perfectly ordinary firearms that have been sold to civilians in the United States for the better part of a century, and they are cultural totems. They are cultural totems for the gun nuts who love them and for those who wish to prohibit their sale. The AR-pattern rifle has a lot in common with the most common rifles and handguns sold in the United States: It has a semiautomatic rate of fire (meaning that it fires once each time the trigger is pulled but doesn’t require any additional steps between trigger pulls, as opposed to, e.g., a bolt-action rifle, which requires that the shooter manually operate a handle that ejects the spent shell after a shot and then chambers another round for the next shot), and it is fed from a detachable box magazine. These features—semiautomatic firing and detachable box magazines—are what make the AR-style rifle useful for many purposes—including mass shootings. But they are features that the AR-style rifle has in common with most rifles sold in the United States and with nearly all handguns sold in the United States. As the engineering of semiautomatic rifles grows ever finer, even pursuits traditionally dominated by bolt-action rifles—long-range precision target shooting and hunting—have seen semiautomatic rifles make incursions, in much the same way that sports cars today mainly have a feature that would have been anathema to a sporting driver a generation ago: automatic transmissions.

The Washington Post series is very focused on the round the AR-style rifle fires, which it describes as “uniquely destructive”—a demonstrably false, quantifiable claim (as I noted at the time). AR-type rifles come in dozens of different chamberings, but the vast majority are chambered for the round that was long the standard-issue cartridge for the U.S. military: the 5.56mm NATO cartridge, which is nearly identical to and effectively interchangeable with the .223 Remington round. (AR-type rifles chambered for the 5.56mm round can typically fire the .223 without issue, though some older .223 rifles cannot safely fire the 5.56mm.) The Post writers claim that it is the speed of the 5.56mm round that makes AR-style rifles “uniquely destructive,” but this is false as a matter of elementary physics. Velocity is not what determines how much damage a projectile does to a human body—kinetic energy is. Chances are excellent that at some point this year you will be struck by something moving about 1 million times faster than the fastest bullet, and you will never even notice it, because the mass of the object in question is so small. Cosmic rays are an example of this. But the principle holds true at a larger scale: There are many cartridges that produce faster bullet velocities than the 5.56mm does. The 5.56mm generally comes out of the muzzle at about 3,250 feet per second (fps), which is a good deal less than hunting calibers such as the .220 Swift (more than 4,000 fps) or the .30/378 Weatherby (5,000 fps). Hunters and long-distance target shooters often prefer faster-moving cartridges because they are easier to shoot accurately: Bullets are not powered like little rockets but are more like rocks fired out of a slingshot, meaning that they begin to drop as soon as they leave the muzzle and gravity begins acting on them; faster bullets reach the target more quickly and thus have less time to fall and so require less adjustment for distance.

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Yes, that’s exactly what he’s saying. He’s admitting the truth about unchecked immigration. It’s importing a slave class but this time they fully count for deciding how the House of Representatives is divvied up as well as somehow getting to vote.

MSNBC Legal Lunatic Frets Over America’s ‘Deep Commitment to Free Speech.’

In the ever-leftward marching world of the erstwhile American political party known as the Democrats, assaults on our most cherished constitutional freedoms are the cornerstone of their efforts to fundamentally transform the Republic.

We’re all used to them making a lot of noise about their disdain for the Second Amendment. The right to keep and bear arms is one of the few freedoms that they’re at least a little bit honest about wanting to take away. They may not admit to their gun-grabbing fantasies, but many of them now don’t say “no” when asked if that’s the end game.

The assault on due process is mostly denial-based. They’ve been using college campuses to test market their gulag/kangaroo court approach to justice for years now. That approach was put into public practice with their treatment of the J6 defendants. When any of the Democratic elite are pressed about the J6 victims of injustice, however, they get the kind of blank stare that Joe Biden would if someone told him to find the exit on his own after a speech.

The Democrats’ assault on the First Amendment has always been the most complex of their anti-American initiatives for a couple of reasons. One is that they love to cherry-pick the First Amendment when needing justification for their war on religion or their right to riot and burn everything to the ground peaceably assemble. The other is that they need to avail themselves of the very right that they seek to destroy.

Awkward.

Leftists come at free speech from a variety of euphemism-laden angles, the most popular one of late being a concern about “disinformation.” Caterwauling about disinformation was key to the Democrats’ political weaponization of the COVID-19 pandemic.

They had so much success with it that they’re not letting it go.

The New York Post:

MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade argued Monday that the United States’ “deep commitment to free speech” makes Americans uniquely susceptible to disinformation campaigns.

McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor, went on “The Rachel Maddow Show” to promote her new book, “Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America.” She said her “goal” with the book was to spark a “national conversation about truth and our commitment to it.”

She added, “I hope that by dissecting it, explaining it, and educating the public, we can all see disinformation for what it is so that we can begin to push back against it.”

Oh, don’t worry, Toots, freedom-loving Americans do see what you call “disinformation” for what it is — an excuse to shut down conversation about anything that runs counter to your false narratives. Because everything is “Opposite Day” when dealing with the Democrats, those rending their garments over the dangers of disinformation are far and away the greatest disseminators of disinformation. Pathological liars love to say that everyone else is lying.

While it’s fair to say “consider the source” when discussing MSNBC, the network did play a role in the aforementioned success that the Left had with their disinformation contortions in 2020.

Ms. McQuade should have borrowed a Mao jacket from Hillary Clinton for this appearance. Hers is one of the most blatantly commie opinions on free speech offered on a network that traffics in commie opinions.

Editorial Says WA Gun Control Bill ‘Uses Public Safety as Smoke Screen’

An editorial in the normally pro-gun-control Seattle Times says a gun control measure aimed at licensed firearms retailers “pushes gun control to a level of punishment for legitimate businesses.”

Singling out House Bill 2118 from among three measures still in play, the Times editorial board recognizes the restrictive nature of the legislation.

“Some lawmakers may not like the selling of guns in Washington,” the editorial acknowledges, “but it’s a legal business. The Times editorial board praised the Legislature for enacting laws that banned the sale of assault-style weapons and ammunition over the past two years. But HB 2118 unnecessarily tightens the rein on gun dealers while using the public’s safety as a smoke screen.”

It is a stunning acknowledgement from a newspaper editorial board which traditionally has supported all kinds of gun control measures.

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Time’s ‘Made By History’ Just Made Up

Once, Time magazine was one of those household names in news. They didn’t break it, but they provided more depth than your local paper really could. People trusted them and Time, back then, lived up to that trust.

Today, like a lot of news publications, they’re a shadow of their former self.

Yet, if I’m being honest, even describing them as that is far too generous. That would imply there’s at least something of the original core still there, just diminished. Instead, all we have is yet another publication ready to spout any anti-gun talking point they care to name.

For example, they recently ran a story about the NRA, premised on Wayne LaPierre’s departure, under their “Made By History” tag.

It doesn’t take long to see it really should be “Made Up History” instead.

Last month, after more than three decades as the figurehead of the modern gun lobby, longtime National Rifle Association (NRA) CEO and executive VP Wayne LaPierre stepped down. His departure comes amid a civil corruption lawsuit brought by the State of New York, which alleges that the NRA and its executives violated their non-profit status and various state and federal laws, as well as grossly mismanaging the group’s finances.

LaPierre stands at the heart of a popular narrative about the recent emergence of the radical right. He has loomed large in the organization’s changing tactics and emphasis as it evolved into a political powerhouse and an uncompromising foe of all gun control.

As the story goes, the NRA was a moderate group focused on sport and target shooting before the “Cincinnati Coup” in 1977. The revolt at the group’s annual convention ushered hardliners into power and drove the reshaping of gun politics in the U.S., including the rise of a new interpretation that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to bear arms. LaPierre joined the organization shortly after the coup and became executive vice president in 1991.

Yet, while LaPierre epitomizes the post-1977 NRA, there is more continuity in the group’s history than is popularly known. Dating back to its 1871 founding, in fact, the NRA has had one consistent priority: protecting social order and control. LaPierre articulated this philosophy after the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012 when he declared that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

The idea is that control of armed force should be deputized to and limited to certain populations—especially elite white men. That has always been the NRA’s driving force, and the only thing that changed after 1977 was the militarization of this organizing precept.

Now, LaPierre has his critics, to say the least, and much of that criticism at least appears to be valid. Yet there’s not a shred of evidence anywhere to support the assertion that when he said “good guy with a gun” that he meant elite white men.

First, how is it that gun owners are at once backward rednecks and also “elite white men” anyway?

Second, anti-gunners keep spouting this idea that we only favor gun rights for white people, yet black gun owners are one of the fastest growing segments, and not a soul I’ve talked to views this as anything but awesome. Another quickly growing group is women, and no one is batting an eye at that, either.

Now, here’s the problem. If this were billed as an op-ed, I’d probably be finished. I might expound on a point or two, particularly with regard to how gun control originally targeted non-white people and only allowed guns for those “elite white men” but, for the most part, I’d focus on that.

Yet this isn’t an op-ed. These are the opening paragraphs that seek to report history.

How can anyone trust any aspect of what follows when their ideological lens is so clearly divined? They’re not interested in the truth or in understanding the past. They’ve got an axe to grind and they expect you, the reader, to ignore it.

What follows from there is, in many ways, revisionism. Sure, it undermines the talking point that the NRA was nice and moderate until 1977 when they suddenly became evil, but it’s also clear that they can’t acknowledge that the right to keep and bear arms applies to everyone and that’s the line the NRA has taken in the past several decades.

There’s been no effort by any gun rights organization to differentiate rights between various racial identities. They fight for people’s right to keep and bear arms. That means people. All people

But the writer over at Time doesn’t see it that way, but since she also clearly has her own view of reality rather than, you know, reality, this is what we get.

What bothers me is how this single line, presented without evidence or context, is likely to be enough to convince people that it’s true, like the lack of evidence is, in and of itself, evidence of its validity when it’s really just journalistic petulance.

So no, Time isn’t a shadow of its former self.

It’s a zombie walking around at the behest of its anti-gun necromancer master.

Of course you interview Putin: The media now opposes freedom of the press. We live in Bizarro World.

Tucker Carlson announced on Twitter that he will be interviewing Vladimir Putin. It will be posted on Twitter.

Carlson explained why: “Here’s why we’re doing it. First, because it is our job. We’re in journalism. Our duty is to inform people.”

He went on for another four minutes but in 20 words, he gave the only explanation that matters. I wish he would drop the imperial first-person.

Among the many replies, Ian Miles Cheong said, “Massive credit to Elon Musk for allowing the video to be posted uncensored. It’ll surely be banned elsewhere.”

Alex Barnicoat tweeted, “Tucker Carlson is about to save us from World War 3 with Russia. The West needs to hear the other side of the story.”

Preventing World War 3? This is why they hate him and why they hate Trump. These idiots want another world war and they really don’t care if America loses.

All evidence points to their desire to lose so they can set up a totalitarian government. The traitors in Washington have emasculated the military and literally cut the balls off generals. They opened the border to allow our enemies in. The traitors welcome Muslim terrorists and Chinese spies. The traitors depleted our military supplies by giving them away to Afghanistan and Ukraine.

You know, FDR never gave away a daggone thing. He made our allies take out loans to pay for the war materiel we sent them.

The traitors oppose giving Putin’s side of the story, as self-servingly ridiculous as it likely will be. Carlson told the Swiss magazine, Die Weltwoche, last fall that the Biden administration prevented him from interviewing Putin.

Carlson said, “I tried to interview Vladimir Putin, and the U.S. government stopped me. By the way, nobody defended me. I don’t think there was anybody in the news media who said, ‘Wait a second. I may not like this guy, but he has a right to interview anyone he wants, and we have a right to hear what Putin says.’

“You’re not allowed to hear Putin’s voice. Because why? There was no vote on it. No one asked me. I’m 54 years old. I’ve paid my taxes and followed the law.”

Nevertheless, Adam Kinzinger of CNN, a former congressman, tweeted, “He is a traitor.”

Not to be outdone, Bill Kristol said, “Perhaps we need a total and complete shutdown of Tucker Carlson re-entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

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Business Insider: Very Dangerous to ‘Indoctrinate’ Young Americans That They Can Lawfully Possess a Firearm.

Get woke, go broke and learn to code. Such is the hard lesson over at Sports Illustrated after the announcement that all of their writers will soon become unemployed and the publication’s future remains “uncertain.”  Enter Business Insider.  nstead of writing about issues germane to commerce and ways to operate businesses more effectively and profitably, BI’s crack team of future coders have gone another direction.

Their latest pearl-clutching screed laments the dangers of teaching America’s young people that they have the God-given right to own a gun for lawful purposes, including self-defense.  Why, it’s almost as if BI interns took a press release from the “Brady” gun control org and decided to post it as headline news on their website.

Shudder.

From Business Insider:

The NRA wants your kid to love guns: programs promote 2nd Amendment absolutism to Kindergarteners on up

For the National Rifle Association, no American is too young to join in their absolutist defense of the Second Amendment — and that includes Kindergarteners.

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BLUF
It’s too bad none of the scores of journalism contests out there yet offers a fake news category. If one did, the 14 stories chosen by the Trace would be award winners.

The ‘most memorable gun violence journalism of 2023,’ according to the Trace
If there was a Pulitzer category for gaslighting, the stories chosen by the Trace would all be serious contenders.

The Trace, the propaganda arm of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s antigun empire, recently published their picks for “The Most Memorable Gun Violence Journalism of 2023.”

If there was a Pulitzer Prize category for gaslighting or agitprop, the 14 stories highlighted by the Trace would all be serious contenders.

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